We were part of a recent Twitter exchange that
began when Steve tweeted in celebration of submitting a manuscript – to its third
different journal:

Well, maybe “celebration” isn’t quite the right word. Nobody likes being rejected, much less being
rejected over and over again. But serial
rejection happens. Not that it’s a
contest, but Andrew’s record (submission of one paper to 9 journals before
publication) beats Steve’s (6 journals). An admittedly unscientific Twitter
poll (n=499) suggests that we’re not outliers:

What is the maximum number of journals to which you submitted a paper before it was finally accepted (including the final submission)?

One respondent, by the way, mentioned a number in the
30s. No, we’re not sure we believe that
one either.

Now, these worst-case data are maxima, and maxima
are notoriously difficult to estimate. We have
another dataset, though, because Andrew has kept meticulous records of all his manuscript rejections*. The message is similar: serial rejections are
common:

Steve hasn’t recorded his rejections as carefully, but believes
his data would look quite similar (albeit with many fewer papers, and please
help him not think too much about that).

Both Andrew and Steve have seen students and colleagues disheartened
by having a paper rejected. It’s easy to
think each rejection is an indictment of your scientific worth. It isn’t.
We think it’s important for scientists to realize that rejection happens
to all of us. Both Andrew and Steve have
had pretty productive careers; both of us have written papers that we’re proud
of. Both of us still get rejected (and
we get at least temporarily disheartened too).
We don’t know anyone who doesn’t.

What about the impact of those serially-rejected
papers? You might imagine that serial
rejection marks a weak paper. It might
also be that with each rejection, the paper moves from a higher-profile journal
to a lower-profile one (from Nature to
Ecology Letters to the Malacological Journal of the East Lithuanian
Natural History Society) – and as a result, a run of rejections dooms a
paper to obscurity. We can test these hypotheses
using Andrew’s rejection data, coupled with citation counts from the Web of
Science:

Serially-rejected papers show no sign of lower citation
impact (log citations/year vs. submissions, P
= 0.08, adjusted r2 = 0.018)**.
There’s a thrice-rejected paper there with over 30 citations/year – 300
in total - and there are quite a few never-rejected papers that are only
lightly cited. Clearly, rejection needn’t
presage low influence.

Rejection also doesn’t mean a paper is bad. Papers are rejected for lots of reasons. They may not fit the journal, or at least the
editor’s concept of the journal. They
may catch a bad-luck assignment of editor or reviewers. The journal may have a huge in-press
backlog. A reviewer may sit down with
your manuscript before their coffee, at the end of a long day, or
just in a bad mood (perhaps because of a serial rejection of their own). And
yes, manuscripts even get rejected because they have shortcomings – but nearly
all such shortcomings are fixable for resubmission.

Which brings us (finally) to Tubthumping, the 1997 hit from the English band
Chumbawamba. You may love this song or
hate it, but you have to admit that Chumbawamba understands the strategy of
academic publishing:

I get
knocked down, but I get up again

You’re never gonna keep me down

You’re never gonna keep me down***

I get
knocked down, but I get up again

By the way, if you’re not in Tubthumping’s corner, you’re welcome to substitute Shine, from
the American post-punk Rollins Band (1994):

If
I'd listened everything that they said to me,

I wouldn't be here!And
if I took the time to bleed from all the tiny little arrows shot my way,

I
wouldn't be here!

You’re welcome.)

Call it persistence, call it stubbornness, call it what you
will: when your work gets rejected, almost without exception**** the only thing
to do is to submit again. Revise, of course, taking advantage of all the help
reviewers have offered you (even
reviews that seem useless at first glance almost always contain value). Both
Andrew’s 9-journal paper and Steve’s 6-journal paper were overhauled along the
way, with thorough rewrites and entirely new data analyses. By the time they were published, they weren’t
the manuscripts that were first rejected.
They were better. Would we choose serial rejection? Of course not –
but we’re glad that we persisted.

The Tubthumping
strategy isn’t just important with a particular rejected manuscript; it’s
important in your career more generally.
Don’t let the rejection of one manuscript dampen your enthusiasm for your
next one:

Finally: you may accept the inevitablity of rejection, but
still prefer not to accumulate too many 6s or 9s. If so, there are some things you can do to
reduce your average number of rejections.
Submit good work – and not just good work, but well-polished writing
that’s benefitted from friendly review by colleagues. Think carefully about the match between your
manuscript and your target journal (if you’re early career, you can ask a
mentor for advice). And it may not reduce the number of rejections, but it
reduces their sting if you plan for them from the get-go: with a prepopulated
list of journals, in order, so the next submission is expected and routine.

No matter how well you understand that rejection is normal,
it never entirely stops hurting. You can’t
let it get to you. So put on Tubthumping or Shine (depending
on your musical sensibilities), turn the volume up loud, and when the song is
over get right back on the horse.

*We excluded papers
that were unlikely to be rejected at their first journal, such as invited
papers, notes on previously published papers, and the like. Including these papers would inflate the “1”
bar but change nothing else.

**Analyses of log-transformed
and untransformed data, and of total citations or citations/year, all tell the
same story, with all r2 < 0.04. The only significant relationship
is for untransformed total citations, which do decline with submission number,
but only with P =
0.036 and adjusted r2 = 0.027.
There’s nothing to see here.

***We are officially agnostic
about the relevance to publishing of “He drinks a
whiskey drink, he drinks a vodka drink/He drinks a lager drink, he drinks a
cider drink”.

****Although we should admit that we haven’t always
persisted forever. Each of us has given up on a paper, too
(expect a future post, if we can bring ourselves to write it). Our point today is that giving up should be
very rare; but for a variety of reasons, it’s occasionally appropriate.